Ok, I had about 8 news stories to post tonight, but other things got in the way. Read further to find out the various things I got pointed to or discovered, or did this evening.

Real news will (probably) be back tomorrow, but for now...

This has got to me my favorite picture of myself. Definitely in the top 5.

A fellow named Omar, a guy I knew from my job at ResNET, created this picture, with some creative Photoshop work. Wow!

I'm going to have to put it somewhere on this site. Now to decide where

For some odd reason I've been feeling like I have more spare time. Maybe the adjustment to "real time" as opposed to "school time" finally hit. Maybe it's 'cause I've finished my taxes and feeling a bit less stressed. Maybe I'm being more lax about the work-load that I have. Maybe I just want more off-line time (oddly enough, dialup has that one advantage - I turn it off, and feel really bad when I'm on it for more then 2 hours. Of course, it sucks for research, or big downloads, or really anything else.) Anyway, I'm not sure if this is a good thing (time away from the computers to reboot) or bad (that I should be a aggressive business man that earns every cent he's getting paid an hour, squeezes (green) blood from every second of his existence. I still fight with this issue from time to time.)

Those thoughts withstanding, tonight I took some time, rebooted my Palm, and read Down And Out In the Magic Kingdom. Great book. Took me like 3.5 hours to read it, so it's probably 120-150 pages. (Update: Amazon Says the hardcover version is 208 pages. Yozzeers!).

I only rarely read stuff less then 400-600 pages anymore. Any less then that and I breeze through it in a sitting (like I did tonight), leaving me with very little sense of accomplishment. Sometimes I make an exception, stuff that I really want to read... but usually I try to stay away).

An interesting contrast to my video-game preferences (games that I can play for 20 minutes and not have to put serious time into), but it exists none-the-less.

Reply to the Digital Broadcast Copy Protection Proposal [Raffi Krikorian]

Task: "Sharing" the SuperBowl (a 43GB file) with another person

Results (over residential broadband):

• Moving around a home network. Doable on 100Base-T equipment.
• Email. Time to Transfer: 5 days
• Web. Time To Transfer: Saturated Internet Connection, experiment aborted with unspecified time remaining
• Physically Moving File: Doable External Hard Drive, expensive any other way

More of his comments

(My) Final Answer to the MPAA: No, it's not feasible for the average person to share movies and stuff. Even smaller movies. You need at least a T1 to think about it... and at $600+/month, I'm sure there's going to be a run on those...

iChat UI Inconsistencies Galore [Scotland Software]

Youch. iChat is "innovative"... just it would be nice if we see a little less of that kind of innovation from Apple.

Or more. I wouldn't mind seeming the whole GUI metaphor being blown away again...

Dragging to another app [Mac OS X Hints]

Woh... no more window shuffling. This is so way cool. I always hated doing that (and probably ended up using the clipboard instead of dragging stuff, in order to get around previous behaviors.)

Brought to you by OS X's cooperative multitasking, or some such Unix buzzword.